Oliver Merkel is Co-Founder of Blocks, a Berlin-based AI-powered cloud cost optimization startup that helps startups automatically cut their AWS bills by up to 20% using an agentic DevOps assistant called Major Tom.

Oliver previously served as a Senior Partner leading the retail practice at Bain and Company, before co-founding Flink, the European quick-commerce grocery unicorn, in 2020.

Having personally experienced runaway cloud costs at Flink, Oliver channeled that operational pain into building Blocks, a tool purpose-built to solve the cloud overspend problem that plagues fast-growing startups.

Oliver led Flink as CEO and Managing Director, scaling the company to over 700 million euros in revenue and a valuation of $2.1 billion, before stepping down in 2025 to launch Blocks.

Blocks secured $6M in pre-seed funding led by Speedinvest in 2026, with its first customer already achieving 28.7% savings on their AWS bill within weeks of launch.